Winter Territory
Winter Territory
A Cameron REACHER Novel
Scott Blade
Also by Scott Blade
www.scottblade.com
Get Reacher Series
Gone Forever
Foreign & Domestic (Coming Soon)
Other Novels
The Secret of Lions
S.Lasher & Associates Series
The StoneCutter
Cut & Dry
Copyright © 2015 Black Lion, LLC.
All Rights Reserved
Visit the author website:
scottblade.com
Get Reacher book series and Winter Territory are works of fiction, produced out of the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or taken WITH permission from the source or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Characters, places, or story arcs that seem based on the creations of other authors are used under indicative permission based on the creator’s public permission, as well as express permission given by representatives of the author, as well as by the author himself.
Note that copyrighted characters are not used. Jack Reacher is the sole property of Lee Child. Permission has been obtained before the publication of this book series.
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Published by: Black Lion, LLC.
Visit the author website:
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Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
About the Author
Dedication
This one is to a great friend, David. And they stay there...
To my fans, thank you.
To Jack Reacher and of course to Lee Child.
The old guy’s watery eyes flicked all around the sunless room and came to rest on his daughter’s eighteen-year-old face (picture).
“Do you have a child?”
“Nah,” Reacher said. “I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” said the old man. “Not anymore.”
—Jack Reacher, Without Fail.
Chapter 1
The man was about twenty-five years old and freezing. The cold pierced through his skin and shot straight to his bones. The temperatures outside dipped into the low twenties and the winter hadn’t even come on yet. Not fully. It was still the middle of November, but the mountaintops were snowcapped and the sky was wet in that cold, dewy feeling that came with high altitudes and cold skies. Which described exactly his location, a high altitude and stark cold weather. He was in the Absaroka Mountain Range, which is a part of the Rockies. The elevation was somewhere above 13,000 feet, but he wasn’t sure of the exact number.
The man was hiding out in a familiar place. A place that he used to hide in when he was young. He felt safe there.
Outside the night wind blew and batted up against the old ruggedly built wooden structure, primitive, but a structure that had endured the cold winters for many, many years. For the moment nothing and no one would find him. He was safe, but it wouldn’t be long. He figured that that was the case, but he had nowhere else to go. The man had run out of options and out of time.
They were coming for him. They were coming and they would come in hot, guns blazing. They would kill him dead for sure. No doubt about it. But that wasn’t even the thing that worried the man at the moment. He had been running for days and he knew that he would come face-to-face with them soon enough. His cover had been blown all to hell and back. There was no changing that now. There was no changing the past.
The thing that was the immediate danger wasn’t the guys coming to kill him for betraying them. It wasn’t the fact that they had trusted him and he had turned on them. It wasn’t the dangerous enemies who once terrified him.
The immediate danger wasn’t the contents of his stolen bulletproof briefcase that was covered in dirt and grime and still damp from being dragged through the snowy terrain.
The immediate danger that ate away at him was that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten in days, so many days that he had no idea when the last time that he had eaten was.
Two weeks ago he had been on a military stealth chopper on his way into Mexico or back from Mexico across the Mexican and United States border. He couldn’t remember for sure. The details were fuzzy now because he was slipping in and out of cognitive thinking. Five or six or seven days without food will do that to a man. He tried to remember his training, his tradecraft, but for some reason all that he could focus on was the stealth chopper.
He had thought that it was such a cool thing. It was a Comanche RAH-70. It was the most terrifying machine that he had ever witnessed. Reports from around the world had claimed that highly modified Black Hawk UH-60s were the stealth choppers used in the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in 2011. The man hadn’t been there in 2011 and he had been far too young at the time to have been involved in that operation, but he did have top secret clearance and was privy to knowledge that the choppers used were in fact Comanche’s RAH-70s, which were cousins of the RAH-66.
Public knowledge says that the Comanche choppers
were canceled way back in 2004. The programs were too expensive for the U.S. military, but not for his employer.
The man’s employer had found use for them and financed dozens of them to be created for stealth missions. They were housed in strategic military installations all around the world. Military service personnel were restricted from accessing them. Authorized persons were told never to reveal any details about them to anyone.
The chopper was a remarkable machine with deadly and accurate machine guns attached.
It was equipped with special side turret style machine guns that fired M50 ammunition at 1,500 rounds per minute. The design was based on the Vulcan style gun. The ammunition housed 500 rounds and could be reloaded in fifteen minutes.
The man knew this information not because of his military training, but because of his tradecraft.
Although, now he questioned the statistics and details of the information that he knew because he also knew one more thing and he knew that for certain: He was starving and the lack of substance in his body was causing him to lose focus and reasoning.
He tried desperately to concentrate on the details of the stealth chopper. It helped. But the one other thought that taunted him was the irony that he was starving, but he was in one of the richest states in the country and at that moment he was a rich man. He was richer than he had been five or six or seven days ago because of the value of the contents of the security briefcase that was in his possession.
Next to the man was a Beretta 9mm, a service weapon that was given to him just before his secret mission. It rested on top of a closed shoebox next to him, in close grabbing distance. Safety on, but that could change quickly. The shoebox was stacked on top of a large old appliance box that now held old items from a childhood long past.
The room that the man was in was dark and dank and not well insulated. Spiders indigenous to the region crawled along the far corner of the ceiling. They crawled in the shadows of a swinging bulb that hung down on a long cord and blew slightly back and forth in a curved arc from west to north.
Somewhere in the room, blowing in from cracks in the roof or unsecured windows, was a wind that chilled the room and blew the bulb around.
The man could hear a faint whistle that blew in with the gusts of wind from the outside terrain.
The man was sitting down on the floor with his back to the wall. He craned up and looked out of a snow-covered, shuttered window above his head. He had to stretch his body back up against the wall and use his arms to hoist himself up just to see down.
Billions of stars shimmered across the stretch of sky. The ground was covered in snow, but the night sky was clear and dark blue and picturesque like the wallpaper on someone’s desktop computer somewhere. Perhaps back at Langley Virginia, which was where he had lived for the last year of his life.
The man leaned forward some more and looked straight down at the front of the house. He couldn’t see the front door from his position, but he was more than two stories up and he could see more than 100 yards down the steep land in front of him. Behind him were dense trees and then the edge of a rugged mountain. He wasn’t much worried about men coming for him from behind because these guys would just come straight up the long, wide driveway. If they could find it. The snow had covered over it and left no signs of where it used to be. More than likely his enemies would be coming in by snowmobile, which he would hear in the dead silence around him. The engine noise would echo and bounce off the far-off trees or the sides of the mountains. No way would anyone surprise him on a snowmobile. The alternative means of transportation would’ve been on horses. The snow covering the ground wasn’t deep enough to prevent horses from riding up the track and a faster way.
Either means of transportation for his enemies wouldn’t matter. He was ready at the moment. His main problem wasn’t how they would come for him. His main problem was when they would come for him.
The owner of the house didn’t know that he was there. He was hiding out. He prayed that he wouldn’t be discovered. The last thing that he wanted to do was involve innocent people.
Just then he heard a noise, a creaking on a staircase below him. He stretched back up and craned his head and looked out the window. He still couldn’t see the front door because of an overbuilt porch, a fact that he had forgotten. Then he remembered that he had just looked down and couldn’t see the front door only moments ago.
The man heard more noises from below him. He heard footsteps growing louder and louder. A moment later someone was on the floor beneath him and then he heard a chair moving across the floor and light footsteps as if someone climbed the chair and then reached up for the rope to the attic door. He heard the creaks and crackles of his frozen bones as he twisted to look at the trapdoor and then the squeaking of springs from the door itself as someone pulled down on it. The sound was deafening in the silence of the house.
The man grabbed his Beretta and quickly pointed it at the attic door as it was pulled downward.
Light flashed in through the crack and up onto the ceiling above him. And then it filled half of the attic. He wanted to slide over and hide behind some of the larger boxes, but he couldn’t really move his legs. He had lost feeling in them some time ago and then he had lost movement. He couldn’t remember when. Truth was that he had forgotten that they were even paralyzed.
The trapdoor came down all the way and the folding staircase attached plopped down below.
The man heard the creak of the wooden ladder as someone climbed it, applying weight to each rung. A head stuck up into the attic and then a body followed.
The tiny figure in front of him scanned the area and the boxes until their eyes connected.
The man lowered his Beretta when he saw a small boy of approximately six years of age. The boy glowered at him in a peculiar way like a mixture of fright, probably because of the gun, and then recognition and then a face that said hey, you know me.
The man had been in and out of sleep for days and had expended so much energy holding the Beretta up that the next thing that happened was the heavy weight of his eyelids slamming his eyes shut.
Chapter 2
Cameron Reacher has being doing what Reachers do—wandering. He has spent the last months doing more and seeing more than he had ever done or seen in his whole life. He traveled from Mississippi, a place that seemed so far away and long ago in his memory. He had traveled through seven states, across hundreds of highways, probably thousands of cloverleafs and over the southern part of the Rocky Mountains. He’d traveled all the way west until he couldn’t go any farther unless he started swimming or chartered a boat or stole a submarine or bought a plane ticket. And even then he was out of states except Hawaii and Alaska, depending on what you consider to be west.
He had only slept about five hours the night before because he had met a girl in Salt Lake City. Her name was Farrah, which he had known as the actress Farrah Fawcett, but when he asked the girl about it, she had denied being named after the actress. She had said that she had gotten that question her entire life, but had never even seen a Farrah Fawcett film. Being that the girl was only 19 years old that had probably been true. Farrah had been dead for years and hadn’t really acted in decades. The only thing that Reacher knew her from was Charlie’s Angels, a horrible show from way before he was born.
Farrah, the nineteen-year-old and not the actress, had been a lot of fun for Reacher. She was a part-time waitress and student, not at the University of Utah, but at a community college. She was taking night classes to be a nurse, a trade that Reacher admired. He admired anyone who was in the profession of helping others. Military, criminal justice, firefighting, medical, even clergymen were all trades that he respected.
Farrah was the complete opposite of Farrah Fawcett, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t gorgeous. The truth was that she was absolutely gorgeous, far more so than the 1970s actress, that was Reacher’s conclusion.
She was six feet tall and mixed with black and white traits. She was dar
k skinned with long black straight hair and even longer legs. She was toned but not in a fitness kind of way, but in a youthful kind of way like she had great genes. Athletic genes was something that Reacher knew about. He himself had been born of great genes, only his genes weren’t really athletic as much as they were like a warrior’s. Most humans had evolved into different shapes and sizes depending on the environment that they had to deal with. Reacher’s ancestors seemed to have developed to the period of when humans were killing wooly mammoths and running from saber-toothed tigers and then they stopped evolving—physically. Instead all of evolution selected to concentrate solely on their brain power.
Reacher had met Farrah at a local bar where she worked and he had asked her to have a drink after she got off. Which they did. His time on the road had been lonely. Reacher accepted that, but an occasional friend was something that he had grown to look forward to. Not that the isolation hadn’t appealed to him as well. He liked to be alone. There was something romantic and purposeful about wandering. He found peace.
After the drink, Farrah had invited Reacher back to her place for another drink. Which turned the one drink into an all-night thing. Which was okay with him.
In the morning, Reacher put his clothes on and said goodbye to Farrah as she slept. He wasn’t sure if she had heard him or not and it hadn’t mattered. He was ready to be on his way.
He left her asleep in her bed in her ground level apartment and locked the door behind him. He left without a phone number or without leaving her one in return. No email. No forwarding address. No point.
He had no phone. No address. No email. At least not one that he checked. There was literally no more existence of the boy who had once lived in Mississippi with his sheriff mother. Most of his life he had been known as Reacher, a name that was his father’s, which was a fact that he had never known until his mother confessed to him on her death bed that his father had been a former military cop turned drifter.